SAN FRANCISCO, CA (10/2/06) -- Will a new balance
of power in hotels make housekeepers and cooks the inheritors of the San
Francisco’s waterfront labor tradition, and lead to the kind of
rise in the standard of living that longshoremen experienced decades ago?

Like the hospitality workers of today, dockworkers
of the 1920s were San Francisco’s low wage earners -- even scorned
as bums and derelicts. Eighty years later, they are some of the best-paid
blue-collar workers in North America. A strong union in the 1930s and
40s knitted waterfront and maritime laborers together in every Pacific
port. It gave workers a new way to deal with the shippers, and with each
other. A radically higher standard of living was one visible manifestation
of better organization. The political organizations on the Pacific Coast
and in Hawaii, which sent a generation of pro-labor politicians to Washington,
was another.

It could happen again, and hotel workers may be
the ones to make it happen. Certainly in San Francisco their union avoided
the disasters of the Southern California grocery strike and the wage and
workforce cuts plaguing the nation’s airlines. But the union did
more than fight a good defensive battle. It changed the rules. It altered
the relationship between hospitality workers and the multinational corporations
who now employ them.

San Francisco hotel workers won big in their new
union contract. Even Noah Griffin, the dour public face of management
intransigence during the two years the city’s hotel union went without
a contract, gave a sunny assessment to the San Francisco Chronicle. "It's
a good settlement,” he gushed, “primarily for the workers,
but also the city and the hotels themselves."

It will certainly cost them a bundle. Not only
will wages rise a dollar an hour for each of the next three years for
most workers (half that for those who get tips), but the big chains –
Hilton, Hyatt, Intercontinental and Starwood – even threw in 60¢
an hour retroactively for each of the past two years. Poetic justice,
since it was their choice in 2004 to refuse to sign an agreement that
would have had them negotiating a new contract in 2006. It was expensive
justice nonetheless, and they wound up negotiating this year anyway.

As UNITE HERE Local 2 President Mike Casey said
in announcing the agreement, “they decided it was cheaper to sign
a contract than go to war with us again.”

But this wasn’t just a limited dispute over
wages – a union in a strong labor town getting serious money for
its members. Some of the hardest-fought parts of the new agreement didn’t
involve money at all, at least not directly. Instead, they put in place
building blocks that may make hotel labor much stronger in years to come
– coordinated bargaining, card check recognition, and civil rights
protection balancing the needs of immigrants and African Americans.

If the hotels learned anything in the last two years, it was that the
union in San Francisco was better prepared for war than they were. Two
years ago, Local 2 asked for a contract that would terminate this year,
enabling them to negotiate at the same time its sister locals around the
country were also at the bargaining table with the same hospitality chains.

In 2004 the hotels agreed to a 2006 expiration
date in a number of major cities. But by the time the San Francisco union
demanded it, they’d realized their mistake and become badly scared.
The notion that independent local unions, which previously could be defeated
easily in local strikes, would band together to negotiate jointly, was
perilously close to even worse ideas (for them.) Common contract expirations
might eventually lead to joint negotiations, multi-city strikes, and even,
in the longer-term future, national master agreements.

So in San Francisco the companies balked. Choosing
this city and this union was a bad mistake. While hotel operators were
able to get 2006 off the table in Washington DC, and weaken the momentum
elsewhere, San Francisco hotel workers held to their guns. They struck
four of the 14 Class A hotels (the city’s most expensive) in the
Multi-Employer Group, announcing they’d stay out for two weeks.
The other ten implemented a mutual support agreement, and promptly locked
out their own workers. Once the two week strike was over, workers in the
struck hotels were locked out too when they tried to return. The hotels
obviously saw no contradiction between their gentlemen’s agreement
to lock arms in an anti-union alliance, and their opposition to local
unions showing the same mutual support. Workers did, though. To them it
smacked of hypocrisy, and made them more willing to stay on the picketlines.

As it ground on, the lockout did more damage to
the hotels than to their employees. After nine weeks, workers were clearly
not frightened, and continued to mount noisy picketlines and drive away
guests. When the hotels cut off payments to the union health plan, other
unions stepped in to make up for them. Management’s own tactics
pushed people together, and made broader class solidarity more necessary
than ever.

At the same time, the hotels had a hard time with
their own business allies. The city’s mayor, a photogenic, TV-savvy
restauranteur, heretofore viewed as business-friendly, tried to broker
a settlement. The corporations’ rebuff carried a resentful tone,
as though he was betraying those who’d propelled him into office.
Mayor Gavin Newsom then went to a picketline at Union Square, in the heart
of the tourist district. In front of the Westin St. Francis he declared
the lockout was hurting city business, and that he would honor the union
boycott of the 14 hotels until they settled.

The hotel corporations finally caved and reopened
their doors to their own workers. The Mayor kept his promise, however,
and stayed away for the next two years. And as room occupancy rates rose
nationally, with the industry recovering from its disastrous decline in
the wake of September 11, 2001, an active boycott cut deeply into San
Francisco’s expected share of sharply rising profits.

Hotel housekeepers, bellmen, cooks and laundry
workers returned to their jobs, but without a contract. To pressure them
further, the companies refused to deduct dues and turn the money over
to the union. Rather than watch its income plummet in the middle of this
battle, however, the union set up a system to collect dues by hand from
over 5000 workers. In the end, “it brought us much closer to our
own members,” said Local 2’s secretary-treasurer Lamoin Wehrlein-Jaen.

Action in the street continued. Noisy marches reminded
managers and travel agents of what a return to war would feel like. Arrests
of dozens of members and supporters for sitting in hotel entrances became
San Francisco’s annual Labor Day observance. And inside the hotels,
workers began to use delegations, petitions and other collective actions
when they had problems on the job. The official position of the Multi-Employer
Group – that since there was no contract, there was no grievance
procedure – created more worker cohesion, not less.

2006 finally arrived, and union contracts began
to expire in other cities around the country. Local 2 was ready to fight
again. The hotels were not.

Negotiations, which had stalled not long after
the lockout ended, were restarted from scratch. Hotels demanded that new
hires receive an inferior medical plan, and pay more for it – the
same basic demand which led to the 4-month strike of 40,000 grocery workers
in Los Angeles in 2003, and which store clerks in the end had to accept.
Local 2 put its old demands back on the table.

This time, however, the parent union’s national
strategy began to have an effect in San Francisco. The huge New York local,
UNITE HERE’s largest, reached agreement in May. It was a six-year
deal, meaning that the union won’t be a factor in the next round
of negotiations three years from now. But New York won substantial raises,
and most important, card-check recognition.

Of all the union demands, this was anathema to
the hospitality chains. Under a card-check arrangement, workers at non-union
hotels run by the same company can sign cards asking for union representation.
When a majority has signed, the hotel agrees to recognize the union and
bargain. This process avoids National Labor Relations Board elections,
which over two decades have become a vehicle for scorched-earth anti-union
campaigns. Managers facing workers who want a union first hire anti-union
consultants. They, in turn, wage a campaign of illegal threats and firings,
designed to produce a momentary majority of workers on election day, so
scared they vote against their own self-interest.

UNITE HERE has card-check agreements in Las Vegas,
where it represents such a large percentage of the casino workforce that
the wealthy operators have no choice but to agree. In the rest of the
hotel industry, however, union busting is the norm. In San Francisco,
it took Local 2 over four years to organize the Parc 55, and at Marriott
Corporation’s downtown flagship, the campaign lasted at least ten.

Ironically, Hilton Hotels broke the logjam in New
York. In the 2004 lockout, Hilton led the other MEG employers in San Francisco
in defying Local 2. In UNITE HERE’s pre-2006 planning, Hilton had
even been chosen as the national target. Workers were interviewed around
the country, and their testimony supported a growing indictment of worker
abuse, especially in non-union hotels.

Following the company’s decade-long binge
of buying out smaller chains, a majority of Hilton workers are now unorganized.
By moving from a majority-union to a majority non-union workforce, the
company has begun to push wages and conditions down, even for unionized
workers. Local 2’s members understood this. Without organizing their
non-union colleagues, they too would feel the same pressure. They recognized
that a new contract had to have more than just wage raises. It had to
include a better process for bringing unorganized workers into the union.

Local 2’s housekeepers and kitchen workers
understood power. They knew the advantage they would have if they could
force the hotels to negotiate in 2006. They knew why they needed card
check. They could have given up these two demands anytime during the nine
locked-out weeks, or the two years without a contract that followed. The
hotels would have gladly given them raises in exchange. But in a convincing
demonstration of the union’s ability to educate its own members,
the workers wouldn’t take the deal.

As New York’s new contract was ratified this
past May, the union and Hilton also announced that the chain was willing
to sign card check agreements in a limited number of other cities. Those
agreements would have to be included in new contracts in each of those
cities, though, and in San Francisco those negotiations were not going
well.

Finally, Local 2 took another strike vote on August
24. A week later, at the end of a noisy march through the tourist district,
over 60 members and supporters were arrested for blocking the entrance
to the Palace Hotel on Market Street. Managers could envision the possible
return of the labor war of two years before. In the shifting alliances
inside the Multi Employer Group, Hilton and its allies succeeded in convincing
a majority of the other operators that they could live with card check
in San Francisco, and reached a deal.

Workers held out for a third strategic goal, however,
which may eventually have as profound an effect on the union’s strength
as card check and common expiration dates. They negotiated an unprecedented
civil rights section of the new agreement, which combines protection for
immigrant workers with a requirement that hotels make concerted efforts
to hire African American workers and residents of other communities underrepresented
in the industry’s workforce.

The proposal stems from an effort by the union
to address changing demographics. In the city’s hotels, the percentage
of African American workers is falling, as employment continues to grow.
African Americans now make up less than 6% of the San Francisco hotel
workforce, a number that has declined in each of the past five years but
one.

In San Francisco, this issue has a lot of history.
The Palace Hotel was the scene of the city’s most famous civil rights
demonstration. In 1963, hundreds of civil rights activists sat in, and
were arrested, in the hotel lobby. They demanded that management hire
Blacks into jobs in the visible front-of-the-house locations, where the
color line had kept them out. The day after the arrests thousands ringed
the entire block in the largest picketline San Francisco has ever seen.

Richard Lee Mason, an African American banquet
waiter at the St. Francis, remembers, “African Americans had been
kept in the back of the house for far too long. People wanted to be in
the front of the house, and rightly so.” Employment prospects improved
for Black workers for some years after the demonstrations, but the situation
changed again in the 1980s.

“I suspect that because the industry had
had a great struggle with African Americans, they thought we were too
aggressive,” Mason speculates. “A lot of us had come out of
the civil rights movement, and we were willing to fight for higher wages
and to make sure we were treated fairly.” Steven Pitts, an economist
at the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California
in Berkeley, adds that “this perception by employers of African
American workers is true nationwide. Blacks aren’t perceived as
compliant, and therefore when many employers make hiring decisions, they
simply don’t hire them.”

Hotels hired increasing percentages of immigrants,
in a move they hoped would create a less demanding and expensive workforce.
In kitchens and among the laundry carts, voices now speak in accents from
Mexico and Central America, the Caribbean, China, the Philippines and
a host of other countries. But if the hotel industry hoped this new workforce
would be more compliant, they were disappointed. Immigrants proved a key
element of the 1980 citywide hotel strike, and smaller conflicts over
the following two decades. But Black employment fell nonetheless.

To restart movement in the other direction, in
2004 Local 2 asked companies to agree to a diversity taskforce, to reach
out to African American communities and eliminate hiring barriers. While
demanding progress towards ending the de facto color line, the union also
proposed new protections for the job rights of immigrants. The union won
strong language allowing workers to keep their jobs for up to a year if
they have to leave to adjust their immigration status. Management is prohibited
from firing workers named in “no match” letters from the Social
Security Administration, because their numbers don’t match the SSA
database (a common cause for termination by employers who assume those
workers are undocumented.)

The union proposal strengthened an important ruling
won six years ago in San Francisco, when an arbitrator held that management
couldn’t use a “no-match letter” to fire immigrant workers
if they had a union contract. Then in 2003 the union organized the Immigrant
Workers Freedom Ride, a national demonstration for immigration reform
joining immigrants with Black veterans of the original 1960s freedom rides.
The mobilization brought people to Washington to push for immigration
reform to make it easier for immigrant workers to join unions, go on strike,
and advocate for their labor rights.

The union’s civil rights proposal “is
an important first step,” according to Pitts. “But in the
civil rights movement we learned we need structural change, that can bring
community residents into the hotels, and make sure they progress.”
The new outreach requirement may have limited impact, but it is a first
step. It puts immigrants and African Americans on the same side. It makes
the union part of a new civil rights movement, geared to a changed world
of globalization. The key is prohibiting discrimination against immigrants
because of their status, while moving towards affirmative action to gain
more jobs for underrepresented communities.

Winning structural reform in hiring will take a
lot of bargaining power – an important argument for card check and
coordinated negotiations in cities around the country. But possibly more
important in the long term, the agreement renews the basis for a civil
rights alliance that can lead to greater political power, as well as increasing
union strength.

In the 1934 San Francisco General Strike, longshore
leader Harry Bridges promised African Americans in the city that if they
made common cause with the strikers, rather than the ship owners, the
union would force employers to take down the color line that barred them
from most waterfront jobs. As president of the International Longshore
and Warehouse Union, Bridges kept his word. African Americans became a
majority of San Francisco longshore workers in later years, and the union
and minority and working class communities formed an alliance that gave
them decades of political power.

Local 2 may become the nucleus of a similar political
alliance that reflects the new realities of the city’s changing
demographics. That could give it an influence, not just in raising the
standard of living of its members, but over the lives of working class
San Franciscans far beyond its own ranks.